by Jack Sharkey
“What are you guys doing here?” I demanded. In speaking, I tried to gesture. That’s when I became aware of the cold steel manacles on my wrists. “What the hell?”
The one with the weapon hefted it thoughtfully in his palm. “Don’t you know it’s a death-penalty offense to have possession of a collapser, chum?” he said.
The other one, not waiting for my answer, began undoing the straps across my body, and assisting me to my feet.
“Say, look, what do you guys mean by coming here and—”
“We were alerted,” said the first man. “By an Amnesty-bearer.”
I simply stared at him for an unbelieving instant. Then I said, “You’re crazy! There’s only one Amnesty in existence, and—”
With horrible clarity, I recalled Snow’s impassioned farewell in the lounge, and the way her hands had darted about; my neck.
I brought my manacled hands up to my blouse and felt frantically for the red and bronze disc. The Amnesty was gone.
“Come along, now,” said the one who’d helped me up.
“Where are we going?” I demanded.
“You’re to be held incommunicado,” he said, “until the Amnesty-bearer returns. Come along, now. We haven’t got all day!”
“Day?” I said, and looked toward the viewport. Sure enough the glaring Martian sunlight was pouring into the cabin. “But we were landing on the night side,” I said, confused…
“You did,” said the one with the collapser. “Only it was arranged that you’d stay asleep for a while, till we could get here.”
“Arranged how?” I choked furiously. Then I remembered the capsules I’d taken. I looked toward the instruction posted on the inside of the cabin door. Now that I was in no great hurry, I could see where someone had, with ordinary pen and ink, gone over the numeral 1, and made it into a passable 2. Someone, I thought bitterly, with shimmering cornsilk hair and red velvet lips!
“Now, just a minute, you guys, I can explain.” I said.
“Stow it,” said the one with the gun. “Come on, get moving”
“When Chief Baxter hears about this—” I growled.
He laughed. “You know Baxter has no authority to override an Amnesty-bearer’s orders!” Once again, he motioned with the collapser in the direction of the door.
“Well then, boys,” I said, in as threatening a tone as I could muster, “let your fat heads chew on this for a while: the girl who has that Amnesty stole it from me! You just get hold of Baxter and verify it. Because if you don’t, there are going to be two slightly-used Security Agent’s uniforms for sale!”
They looked at each other, frowning. Then the one with the gun scowled. The other guy paled. “Say, Charlie, what if there is something to his story? What do you think we ought to do?”
Charlie blinked and thought hard. Then a smile crossed his face. “Nothing,” he said. “We were given orders by an Amnesty-bearer, and all we have to do is carry them out to be in the clear.”
“Oh, yeah?” I grunted. “Five’ll get you ten Baxter thinks differently!”
The one who wasn’t Charlie hesitated, and his grip, hitherto vise-tight on my upper arm, went suddenly slack. “Disobeying an Amnesty-bearer is unprecedented,” he said carefully.
“So is the theft of the Amnesty!” I shouted in exasperation.
The other one looked at Charlie. “Maybe we ought to call Baxter, just in case.”
“In my book,” Charlie muttered, “that’s not holding a guy incommunicado!”
“The hell it’s not,” I snorted. “I won’t communicate with him. You two guys do it. Do it any way you can square it with your sense of duty. Either tell Baxter you have a man in custody by the name of Jery Delvin or that the Amnesty is in the possession of a blue-eyed blonde girl, and see what he says!”
Two hours later, I was facing the image of a purple-faced Chief Baxter on an interplanetary videoscreen. "Sorry to be so long, Delvin,” he said apologetically. “But I’d left orders not to be disturbed. Anyway, I’ve given the men instructions to return the collapser to you, and an authorization permit for it, in case you meet any more agents.”
“Which heaven forbid!” I growled. “No red tape with an Amnesty. Ha!”
“Uh. Yes. So you can continue with your search, Delvin. Have you found anything interesting?”
“Full report when I get back, Baxter,” I said. “Right now, I have a date with a beautiful blonde.”
“A date?” he choked out. “But—”
"Signing off,” I said, and cut the circuit. I belted the collapser into place around my waist, and started off for the city proper. Somewhere in Marsport there was a lovely blonde girl named Snow White, who could do anything, anything at all, and get away with it. Anything but one thing.
She couldn’t get within a foot of me again! Not if I had anything to say about it.
8
Marsport, the largest—if you excluded the prospecting encampments within a hundred-mile radius of the place—city on the Planet, had grown fast, from the time of its founding in 2014. Originally simply a mining site for the TriPlanet Refining Corporation, it had spread backward from the area of the original mines in a rough circle, beginning with the monotonous quonset huts of the miners, and modulating in its move toward the perimeter to smart iron-and-adobe structures. Some of these, thanks to the less-than-half Earth’s normal gravity, as high as fifteen stories.
The planet, barely half the diameter of Earth and a tenth of Earth’s mass, was a minerologist’s paradise. The rusty red sands of the Martian desert were almost pure ferrous oxide, a source of both iron for the profitable refineries and oxygen for the inhabitants of Marsport.
Going Los Angeles one ridge better, Marsport was completely circumscribed by high crimson hills, and this natural bowl formation, plus oxygen’s heavier-than-air-density, allowed the city to be filled with breathable atmosphere, much as tobacco smoke can lie surging gently within an ashtray if the air in a room is still. This made planetary windstorms a hazard.
Outside the hills, of course, the air was thin, cold and barely able to support life, being comparable to the biting cold air atop Mount Everest. Human lungs could not breathe it for long without freezing. Naturally, there was a high casualty rate amongst the prospectors, despite their pressurized metal huts and oxygen masks. But uranium, as it had been since the advent of the atomic age, was enormously well-paying to the one miner in twenty to find any in Mars’ body breaking hinterlands with its roasting dry heat of day and blood-freezing cold by night.
And then there was parabolite.
This mineral, found in abundance beneath the Martian sands, was, theoretically, worth ten times its weight in gold to the people who might mine it. I say theoretically, because no one had as yet found a way of getting any ore. Paradoxically, the feature which made parabolite so vitally desired was the same feature which prevented anyone from mining it: it was totally indestructible.
The name had been given it by the scientists who studied the three solitary fragments of it found small enough for shipping back to Earth. There was just no way of chipping a piece loose for analysis. The name was due to the oddly shaped molecules which made up this mineral. All of them seemed to be joined atomically into perfect parabolas, no matter which way you came at them. Which meant, in effect, that when anything was brought to bear against the substance, pressure which struck one end of the parabolically curved molecules was retransmitted by the other end, back to the thing putting pressure on it. Result: it “hit back” with a violence equal to that applied to it, and sustained no damage whatsoever to itself. Chemicals were tried when pickaxes had failed, but the substance was inert. It gave no sign of reacting either to hydrofluoric acid, which could cat its way through glass, or to aqua regia, which could eat through anything else.
They even tried using the collapsers on it. These deadly weapons, which worked by the simple process of killing the attraction between the protons and electrons, could, in the briefest time, reduce anyth
ing to less than dust. The electrons spun away in a blinding blue-white flash, and the stripped-down protons, being less than atomic in size, fell silently down into the heart of the planet, leaving a virtual nothingness where the object had been.
But on parabolite, even these mighty weapons were useless. Oh, they had found that training a battery of them on a chunk of parabolite, for a period of days, with an enormous drain of power keeping the weapons firing continuously, did get results. The overall mass of the chunk was reduced by one-millionth of a gram. Which was less than useless, because not only was that amount completely impractical to obtain, but it was not even obtained, thanks to the collapsers’ destructive potency. It was merely destroyed.
And so, vast acres of this fortune-making mineral lay all about the planet, as common as sandstone was on Earth. And no one had any idea of how to get any of it, not even the natives.
Yes, there were natives, of a sort, on Mars. Strange beings, albeit friendly, made up, except for a fraction of a percent, of sugar.
They were crystalline, these beings, covered over with prisms of bright red sugar that gave them, with their scuttling gait and long pointed tails, the appearance of man-sized lizards. A lot of their metabolism was a mystery to us, but we did know that they, like plants on Earth, lived by a sort of modified photosynthesis.
At first thought, this seems strange, since we are used to green as the primary necessity in a photosynthetic metabolism. But it made sense when you remember that foliage looks green because the green rays of the sun are reflected, and the red rays absorbed. Since a crystal passes only the rays which correspond to its color-structure, they did quite well, photosynthetically. Air and water were their chief foods, of course. The water they inhaled through rubbery-looking hollow tongues which extended a good two feet from their wide, dragon like mouths. The distance was a necessity, due to their exteriors, which, as I’ve said, were made of red crystalline sugar. They could take water on the inside, but it was fatal on the outside.
The first men on Mars had felt pretty silly standing guard over their encampments with water pistols. But the sugar-feet, as they came to be called, proved friendly enough in a non-obsequious way. They seemed, on investigation, to be the Martian equivalent of cats.
By that I mean that they must have been the self-sufficient pets of the Ancient Martians. They tended to be standoffish and annoyingly smug, but not menacing in any way. After all, why should they be menacing? We had nothing they wanted. Our food was useless to them, as were our clothes, gold or anything else in the way of possessions. They liked our water, of course, but long evolution in the Martian deserts had kept their physical need for this commodity down to a minimum. The average sugarfoot drank about a pint of water per week, which was no menace to us, even when we’d firstx landed and water was in short supply.
But of the Ancients, they could tell us nothing, any more than an alien landing on a depopulated Earth could find out about men from an alley cat. We knew there had been intelligent life, though. There were remnants of buildings still to be seen half-buried in the rust-red sands, and bewildering little artifacts for which no conceivable use had as yet been convincingly postulated. There was one thing, though, that bothered us about these buildings and artifacts.
They were made out of parabolite.
How had the Martians carved, or molded, or otherwise affected the shape of this indestructible mineral? We had no idea.
Marsport had a population of about one hundred thousand families, averaging five people to a family, so it was a good-sized city for Snow to hide herself in.
On the other hand, I wasn’t absolutely sure just why I was looking for her. After all, I didn’t really need the Amnesty. A collapser carries a lot of weight on its own. And an Amnesty’s power was only in proportion to the esteem in which an approached individual held the authority of the World Government.
The more I thought of it, the more I wondered why I was so determined to find Miss Snow White. She’d only be a hindrance to me, really, what with short-circuiting my spotting technique. And a man on a mission of such grave importance Wouldn’t simply seek out a girl because she had cornsilk hair and red velvet lips, would he? Well, would he?
As I thought all of this, I was striding swiftly along Von Braun Street, the main thoroughfare, ignoring the stares of passersby as they spotted the golden collapser belted about my waist. Passing a small bar, I happened to glance in through the window. And there was her photograph on the stereo over the bar. The men along its polished metal length were staring at her with interest.
Curious and puzzled, I turned back and went inside the bar to hear what was being said about her.
“Shoot to kill! Repeat: Shoot to kill!” said the announcer’s voice from the speaker. “She is not to be obeyed under any circumstances. The Amnesty is a forgery. Repeat: A forgery.”
I found myself leaning weakly against a wall by the door as the sense of the message came home to me. Baxter had lost no time making up for my stupidity in losing the Amnesty. He didn’t dare admit it had been stolen, because Amnesty-bearers, like myself, were considered by the populace to be intelligent, and very clever. It wouldn’t do to weaken public opinion of IS.
But to kill! From Baxter’s viewpoint, it made sense. If she were simply shot down, then she couldn’t mention the fact that it had been stolen, either.
As a patriot, I should have been happy to see my government operating with such efficient dispatch. For some reason, I was not happy at all. I thought of those soft warm lips pressing gently upward upon my own, albeit in the act of deception, and felt suddenly sick inside.
“Something for you, buddy?”
I looked up. The bartender, his voice mirroring the polite caution with which people spoke to collapser toters, was down at my end of the bar, by the doorway, his face strained into a nervously hearty anxiety to please.
Irritably, I leaned forward to rasp a negation into his face at close range, and then I decided to create no more ruckus than I had to. “Okay,” I grunted.
“Yes, sir,” he said, spinning about and commencing to do dextrous things with the flashy array of bottles behind the bar and a tall frosty mixer.
“Down the hatch,” he smiled, setting the glass of shining chartreuse liquid before me.
I nodded, and took a sip. It was good, whatever it was. It was a little nose-tingling, like a stinger, and yet there was something, a not unpleasant bitterish aftertaste. The glass fell from my suddenly numb fingers and shattered loudly on the bar. I tried to get up, and couldn’t.
The floor of the bar was warping, tugging at me. I was unconscious halfway down.
9
My first awareness was the whine of the converters, audible everywhere in Marsport, if not by ear, then by the soles of one’s feet. Their thundering dynamos plunged potent destructive rays against the Martian sands, leaving in their wake invisible fountains of nascent oxygen and shimmering puddles of orange-white molten iron. They went on day and night without ceasing, partly to keep the mining companies on Earth from losing their franchises with Tri-Planet, but primarily to keep the Marsport populace from tumbling down in the streets with cyanosed lips and glazing eyes, as the breathable atmosphere sloughed away over the hilltops.
So I knew that I was in Marsport, at least. But not much else. My hands, when I tried to move them, proved to be bound, and tightly, at that. My fingers felt swollen and numb when I tried to flex them. There was something, a hood, a sack, a cloth, over my head, fastened about my throat, impairing my breathing slightly and my vision altogether.
I found, though, that I could move my legs, but it was little help when I wouldn’t know where they were carrying me if I chanced using them. For all I knew, I was lying on my back atop a precipice. Moving about could be disastrous.
So I lay still and spent my time wondering why that bartender should have slipped me a mickey.
It was senseless, in a way. I mean, even granting that there was some sort of inimical agency he
re attempting to forestall investigation of the missing Space Scouts, how did they know that I was the proper Amnesty-bearer? Or that there was an Amnesty-bearer around? And, knowing this, how would they know that I’d turn into that particular bar?
The thoughts were too confusing, so I gave them up, and just lay there in darkness, worrying. And not, strangely enough, about my fate, but about Snow’s. Security Agents were keen-sighted and perfect shots. And a collapser beam wasn’t choosy about what it annihilated.
I’d come to while lying on my back, but had chanced turning over on my face to get my body weight off my hands. A little life seemed to be oozing back into my thickened fingers. I tried the cords on my wrists again, but they were still taut and firm. Then one of my fingers found the loose end of the cord, and felt its surface. It was one of those nylon ropes with a steel wire center. I gave up trying to undo it.
How long had I been lying wherever I was, anyhow? I had no means of knowing. It might have been an hour, a day, or merely minutes. How far behind Snow’s trail had I fallen thanks to this damnable delay? And did she know she was being hunted?
I shifted over onto my right hip to feel if my collapser holster were still in place. Something pressed back against me, but it had too much give to it. The holster was there, all right, but it was empty.
Obviously, I couldn’t do anything else until I could see. I tried catching at the hooding material with my teeth, but it was stretched tautly across my features, and evaded them with maddening efficiency. On reflection, I saw that this was the reason I hadn’t smothered. Looser cloth would have leaped easily to block mouth and nostrils against my unconscious breathing. I wondered if the tautness was an oversight, or purposely done to ensure my staying alive.
That took me about three seconds to figure out. If I was still alive, then they wanted me for something further. If they hadn’t, then the cord binding the hood to my neck would have been used as a simple, efficient garrote.
